Every Palestinian has the right to fight for his home, his land, his family, his dignity— these are his rights. - George Habash November 2023 National Tech Committee Newsletter

Dear comrade,

In this newsletter, you will find information on:

  1. Testing OpenSlides for Chapters,
  2. How to get involved in the NTC,

But first, we have a new report to share with you…

The Discussion Forum Report

After the NTC was given stewardship of the Discussion Forum in the beginning of September, the committee immediately announced a Maintenance window scheduled for the morning of October 1 to begin the three years of maintenance updates the forum was behind on. This process involved tasks ranging from server maintenance, application updates, and configuration of the initial new features on the Discussion Forum. These updates have transformed the platform!

DSA Discussion Board Check out the About the Forum category to see what's new! If you need help, please search below. Kissinger dead! this mfer is finally dead
One of the biggest features of the revamped Discussion Forum is a new visual interface, “Discourse Air”. Along with our upgraded version of Discourse came the new sidebar which aligns the forum to messaging applications such as Slack and Discord. Other major features we’ve implemented include the Discourse Groups feature, which permits some friendlier features like tagging associations via user titles and a smaller icon (called Avatar Flair) next to usernames. Read our full report here. Need access to the Discussion Forum, sign up using the email account associated with your DSA membership using this form.

Testing OpenSlides for Chapters

and National Bodies

The NTC is testing using OpenSlides, the same tool we used at Convention, for chapters and national bodies. The National Political Committee (NPC) has approved our work plan for this wider roll out of OpenSlides. DSA members will soon be able to use OpenSlides to read introduced resolutions, propose amendments, and finally vote, both at the chapter level and as part of national working groups and committees.

OpenSlides Dashboard Meetings Committees. Democratic Socialists of America. Committees. 1 of 1 Filter Sort. National Tech Committee. The DSA National Tech Committee (NTC) is a collection of volunteer tech.
While the NTC isn’t ready to announce this launch to the larger organization, two large chapters will be our beta testers prior to our DSA-wide roll out! Following this initial period, we hope to give all DSA bodies the same features and functionalities enjoyed by delegates at Convention, with the added benefit that you will be able to use one login for OpenSlides across chapters and national bodies. On top of this, we’re working to get the NPC on-boarded and to permit any member to observe NPC meetings and voting. To catch up on our work with OpenSlides, check out this report we published in July before the convention. But there’s a ton of areas to get involved in and so much more for us to do! We’re looking for comrades with technical or guide writing experience, sysadmin experience, or just general ability to be able to help build out chapters and national committees. We need all the help we can get to make sure this is a successful – and foundational – change for how DSA does its business. We have a Kanban board on the NTC Discussion Board of our current area of work which can be viewed here.

Get involved in the NTC

If you are interested in joining the NTC, please fill out this form or email us at [email protected]. Join us!
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Questions? Comments?

Email us at [email protected]